this morning could have easily finished off the job.
To review – Monday I had an appointment at the VA. I ran out of time to wait for my scripts as I needed to get Dani somewhere else by 1545. I said I would be back in the morning to pick everything up. Yesterday I came over and spent several hours finding out that 1) my scripts had been mailed.
(Hello? I am leaving on Saturday. I am out of meds. Do you seriously expect the mail is going to arrive in time? I do a lot of stupid things in my life, but skipping life required meds isn’t in the plan. I enjoy being alive to be a PITA to everyone in my life.)
So I get here as early as reasonably possible having decided that exercise class would be good to decrease my general level of hostility. I even paid for parking at North Berkeley scoring the third to the last parking place in the overflow lot.
The game starts at 1235…
I stop at the pharmacy. They hand my script. It isn’t my med. (Foreshadowing – if I had known the insanity the next couple of hours were going to involve, I would have kept my mouth shut and left). This is “D2” – I’m on “D3.” Oh – I will check with the doc. I thought I had a previous script in the system. The notes just say Vit D replacement. Different half-lives for the two. After 90 minutes, I prove what I am on by Dani taking photos of my script bottle at home and emailing. Yep – D3, but from LRMC. Why don’t I just ask them to refill the script?
You are kidding, aren’t you? Landstuhl Hospital is in Germany, they are 9 hours ahead of us. I can’t exactly stop by and the mail would take a long time. Repeat – flying on Saturday.
She contacts the doc. The staff goes for a meeting. They come back. I make a couple more trips to the window – they don’t usually page and the electric pharmacy “scripts ready” sign is still out of order.
I finally get handed a bottle about five minutes before I am going to lose it completely. The bottle contains barely enough capsules to see me through the trip. At this point, I really don’t care any more.
The A’s lose again. Instead of three of us in the Flag&Drum RF149, there are eight so the sunshine feels good and there is plenty of time to socialize. Jane was returning from Singapore today to SFO. The third of our early 1980’s female officer triumvirate who also lives here in the Bay Area picked her up at MacArthur Station for the afternoon. We met up at Gaumenkitzel early evening for supper and a reminisce of life as it was then. Balancing jobs, families and superiors who did not appreciate female subordinates and used their discriminatory powers with glee.
Somethings have changed for the better in the last 35 years. Not completely fixed mind you – but definitely better. It was fun being able to reminisce with those who had been there, done that, survived. Not living in the past, but pulling the memories out of storage, brushing them off and looking back with eyes significantly older. One would hope wiser as well. Not needed on a daily basis, but it was an interesting and defining time in our lives.
